It would be better if the Flash Player installer produced some kind of error message, because it fails silently behind my university proxy, producing no visible output whatsoever. Because of this, I thought the installer was corrupted or was being interfered with by another running program, and rebooted the PC and ran the installer using ProcMon to investigate. A bit frustrating.

Why doesn't it work behind a proxy though? It should either pay attention to the system-wide proxy settings, or at least provide its own configuration dialogue for a SOCKS/HTTP proxy.

"Why doesn't it work behind a proxy though? It should either pay attention to the system-wide proxy settings, or at least provide its own configuration dialogue for a SOCKS/HTTP proxy."

As far as I know, I'm not using a proxy, but I couldn't get install_flashplayer11x32_mssd_aih.exe to run without first right clicking, going into Properties, and then unblocking. I don't recall having this issue with prior Flash installers. For curiosity's sake, try downloading that installer and see if unblocking works. I wonder how many others are having the same issue.

Wow, good call! I redownloaded the online installer, verified that it still produced no output, then went to properties and sure enough, there was an "Unblock" button. I've never seen this behaviour before - all other downloaded programs produce an "Open File - Security Warning" dialogue box which notifies me about the frankly bizarre behaviour of Windows and lets me choose to run it or cancel.

Why does it work differently with the online installer?

A strange thing - when I unblocked and ran the installer, then cancelled it, it deleted itself from my downloads folder. Very odd.